The Evolution of Media

SOCIAL SPHERES AND GLOBAL COMMUNITIES: THE EVOLUTION OF MEDIA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

SCOTT HENDERSON ’88

TRENT Magazine was pleased to see one of our own, alumnus Professor Scott Henderson, take on the role of dean and head of Trent University Durham GTA. Noting his background in communications and popular culture, we invited him to contribute a piece to the magazine, giving an intro to his area of his study. He responded with this assessment of the changing nature of media, technology, and the ways the two are becoming interchangeable.

Ihad a rather strange battle with spellcheck a few weeks ago. While trying to send a text, my phone kept correcting the word “gave” to “have.”

This wasn’t the usual “fat thumbs” typo. After it happened once, I became very careful in my typing; and still spellcheck’s algorithms continued to insist that I meant to type “have.”

While I am sure it was some sort of internal glitch, the incident was also a reminder to me of the ways in which media technology and culture are intertwined. My own fascination with the ontological properties of media has its origins in my undergraduate years at Trent, where a joint major in History and English had me ruminating on the intersections between texts and their contexts. Spellcheck’s insistence on “have” over “gave” might then tell us something about contemporary culture.

In an era when online shopping portals offer “recommendations for you,” where Netflix and other media providers curate collections based on our own anticipated tastes, where music streaming services develop playlists of songs we like or love, we do exist in a culture where “having” is predominant. Water cooler moments of shared cultural touchstones have been replaced by spoiler alerts, lest we ruin the future streaming opportunities of our online friends.

One telling example of the turn to a “me-centric” use of technology is with maps. Where once we unfolded paper maps, and used our fingers to trace a line from here to there and imagined where we would be going, our contemporary GPS systems place us at the centre of our universe, and “there” comes to us. All of these enhancements align with a neoliberal culture in which we are encouraged to put our own interests above those of any wider societal collective. It is a culture where we are encouraged more to have than to give.

Of course, I am cognizant that my own critiques of contemporary technology are not all that distinct from concerns raised each time that new forms of media technology have emerged. The arrival of the printing press was not without its naysayers, decrying the loss of an intimate relationship with the text that could only be gained by written transcription. The darkness of early cinemas was a supposed lurid atmosphere, television was the “idiot box,” dumbing down culture, popular music turned youth on to sex and drugs, video games led to violence, and the list goes on. While undoubtedly media can influence certain patterns of behaviour, and one need look no further than a commuter train filled with people glued to screens, the reality is that

media and technology do much more to enhance existing aspects of civilization. To study these intersections between media and society is to understand ourselves and our culture.

When France’s Lumière Brothers first began publicly projecting films in 1895, their short works featured their families, travels, pastimes, and the workers in their factories. More than a century later, early YouTube allowed for the sharing of similar personal moments; the inaugural video featuring one of the founders’ trips to a zoo. Clearly the urge to document ourselves and our existence is not new, and there is ample evidence of selfies from the earliest days of photography. The lengthy evolution of film, and eventually television and new media, as influential cultural forms in the twentieth century, did not occur in a vacuum, but emerged and developed in alignment with the cultural and historical changes of that century. The progression in their application and use tells us about ourselves, our values and our beliefs.

So while I may decry a current culture that places self-interest as paramount, there is evidence of change being facilitated and enhanced by contemporary technology. One simply needs to look to the efforts of Greta Thunberg, who in the space of a year has gone from a lone voice seated outside of the Swedish parliament to the inspiration for a global youth movement. Fridays for Future has been enabled by technology, put to use to connect youth with a growing concern for the fate of our planet. And it is far from the only movement that has been facilitated by a use of new technology. We may want to recast young people’s use of social media as less about self-interest and more about sharing and connecting. An online presence is about entering a social sphere, and increasingly has become about creating global communities, whether these be about issues such as climate change, or about a shared love of something such as K-pop. And these are not mutually exclusive, as all of these interactions bring people together in ways that allow for a sharing of diverse voices. While these interactions are not always unproblematic, the lens we place on these activities may be more indicative of our cultural attitudes than the motivations behind them. The evolution of media in the twentieth century should alert us to the fact that twenty-firstcentury media are themselves still in a state of evolution. We live in challenging times, but also exciting times, changing times—and it is important for us to retain our critical perspective.

There is promise in a future where youth utilize media to create global connections, assert an identity, and engage in conversations that build a global community. If we are concerned about new media, then perhaps our concerns are more about our culture and how we are using that media, while there are abundant examples around us of the potential it offers.